By Will McInnes

Bulleted review of Sauze d'Oulx as a snowboarding resort

I believe in ratings and reviews so I gotta do Sauze a favour and review it for the rest of the interweb's population in case they want to book a holiday and need a reliably unreliable normal person's view.

Here it is...

• Sauze d'Oulx is pronounced 'Sow-zee Dooo'
• Massive ski area, once you link up with Sestrierre and potentially beyond
• Very few blue, tons of red runs, very few black, and a few dedicated nursery slopes complete with travelators for the lazy, weak learners
• Good for learners in that lots of room, reasonable tuition and no particular snobbiness on the slopes (unlike Les Arcs, France, where I learnt/wiped innocent skiers out at random with rugby-like grand-piano aplomb)
• Reasonable board park at Sestrierre but no travelator or drag lift
• In mid-March, really nicely unpopulated pistes, with very few queues at lifts and almost empty runs towards the end of the day
• Lift attendants are as surly, useless and negative as in France - total bastards
• Lifts are mainly good, modern and fast, but there are a few very ropey metal jobs that feel enjoyably precarious

• Good apres ski: lots of bars; good friendly bar staff; happy hours
• Equally, good restaurants and broad enough mix of accomodation that it doesn't feel like a go-ka-ray-zee party town where a quiet week would be impossible
• Disappointing mix of nationalities - mainly British, Irish and Italian on the slopes, and just the Brits and Paddies out on the town - needed some bonkers Austrians
• Italian Sambuca is rougher than that served in the UK but seems to achieve broadly the same results, particularly once into double figures
• Even basic Italian food is 100x better than English - the Minestrone, Pizza and Ravioli may all looks the same but are each a taste sensation in their own right, which is seriously eye-opening into all of those resentful comments over the years from European mates about the crapness of what us English expect from food served

• Even the crappy cheap takeway pizza place, the guy was kneading the dough on demand to each order...
• Tons of kids, especially Italian young families - looked great for families and I'd definitely take mine there
• Reasonable transfer time from Turin - 1.5 hrs ish
• We went with Directski.com booked last minute - no unnecessary embellishments or frills in the service, but the rep was very very good and everything worked just fine - oh, and the lady that helped us organise it in their call centre was also lovely, so I guess that worked out well too

All in all, definitely go there unless you're advanced level and expect loads of black runs and boardpark galore.

Ciao bella, tutti frutti, molto bravo, scusi, cinque birra, uova, i promesi sposi.

Flight of the Conchords

Video: Timber on Brighton Beach this morning

This is a quick video of Brighton beach this morning, with all the flotsam from the cargo ship sinking off the South coast of England.

The light was gorgeous down there at 8.45 am - hope you enjoy..

stuff that's been happening

Attended, spoke at and thoroughly enjoyed Widgety Goodness, the European widget conference here in Brighton - bring on the USA version and UK 08. Well done Ivan and Emm. Some good follow on chatter out there on the blog-o-smell.

A major virtual world is about to announce locating in Brighton, to add to Linden Lab who we already have - bring on the world-class cluster here in the B-town digital mafia. COOOOL.

Spoke to Cisco's European 'Theatre' marketing team (c.110 people from across Europe with some Americans from HQ too) this morning at Ascot racecourse on how social media is changing marketing - that was nice apart from the 5 am start. Plucking freezing this moaning.

Heard the progress report on the vision for Wired Sussex at the board meeting this week from Phil Jones, new CEO, and it's ambition and grassrootedness are both brilliant and frankly inspiring - expect lots more from a reinvigorated Wired Sussex, an important hub in Brighton's digital community. (Key quote: 'it's all about the members, stupid').

Just starting to play with Seesmic (whereas Ivan's gone off the deep end).

Wanting to play more with Dopplr and FFFFound! when I get the time (and a FFFFound invite)

Tommy Two Shoes and I went to the e-consultancy Christmas party - no sign of the 500 odd subscribers but saw some friendly faces and made awkward small talk with some randoms!

The legend that is Chabal

Making do

Don't like scrapheap challenge, can take or leave red dwarf (infidel, I know) but love this one-man campaign.

(Via Russell Davies, via Iain Tait).

Our Brighton beatboxing roller-skating legend

I cane it along the seafront cycle lane riding from Brighton (work) back to home in Hove. The sun is usually starting to set, I'm riding into the wind and on the lawns and beaches people are barbecuing, playing football barefooted and cracking open the ol' vino.

Then, picture this, in front of me, leisurely rollerskating (old skool, man - now namby-pamby blades here bwoyyyyy) down the cycle lane towards me is a tall, slim man with a beard, long hair in a ponytail, a two-piece matching blue old-skool adidas tracksuit clutching a beat box under one arm. Not too unusual at this stage.

As he gets closer I become aware of the sound.
Mashed up white noise car crash sound effects of music played at a volume that the speakers could never cope with. Distorted or pre-distorted - either way it's mashed.

And then I note the intense eyes, slight gurning and occasional tossing back of the head as if in some kind of spirtual state of ecstasy and enlightenment.

I nearly fell off my bike the first time I witnessed his old school rollerskating dancing to distorted beatbox sound effects. Pure genius.

To find he has a group of appreciation on Facebook was genuinely thrilling - I share this experience with many others.

To find he has a website with writings, and has written a definition on urban dictionary was - well - unbelievable. You can't write this guy off as a random nutter. A Brighton legend before our eyes.

Class.

Our family endurance test continues

Aaaaarrrhgggghhh.
Today was the fairy tale ending - Jack was taken out of his medieval 'gravity cures all' traction, and three days early. Woo hoo!

He was delighted, and so were we very briefly.

But what we were told, in our 4 minutes of conversation with the consultant (taking our cumulative doctor time to approx. 20 minutes over the past 5 and 1/2 weeks), whilst he had one had on the door handle for a quick getaway was "but he mustn't walk for four weeks - absolutely not - he can crawl, he can sit, but no walking". And then he walked out. Sia-fookin-nara.

Talk about bitter sweet.
Talk about light at end of tunnel, and not quite even there yet still.

Jack is so weak now. Legs atrophied and limp hanging. Neck muscles out of practice so that his head wobbles like a Parkinsons sufferer, like he has a Pumpkin for a head balanced on a toothpick. It's sad, and totally reminds us of the incident that caused all this - a moment costing us all 3 months of endurance and strain.

Still, we're exhausted but we'll get there.
I'll bitch about the doctors another time.

Don't drive, won't drive

I don't drive. I've never learnt, or at least - I did a one week crash course (bad terminology) about 8 years ago and wasn't ready for the test at the end of it.

Life's been fine: my driving friends find this unbelievable, to the hardest of hardcore of them this is deeply baffling, perverse even! 'How can you live in this world without driving?' (subtext: '...weirdo...'. But I'm lucky to live and work in Brighton & Hove, where I can ride anywhere within 25 minutes, from one end of town (deepest darkest West Hove - don't say the 'P' word) to where we work on the bustling bohemian central east side of town.

But with the business this does cause occassional annoyance. For example we now have 3 major clients further along the south coast - Fat Face, University of Southampton and Stannah. Driving would make getting to at least one or two of those easier. It should be said though that business travel on trains is LOTS more productive, you can work most of the time on most journeys.

More compelling though has been the family.
My wife doesn't drive either, and with a toddler and another one on the way, our horizons have for once been truly limited - visiting the farms, zoos, play centres, charming pubs and other stuff away from mainline public transport links.

So I had a lesson today, and it was fantastic.
Much more came back than I expected, and I'm happy to be heading down the road (boom boom!) to driver status.
Bring on the road miles :)

Recent book reading

Finished American Pastoral by Philip Roth.
I'd love to know what other people think of it.
For me, it was an incredible book, a real momentum builder, with a slow but warm, nostaligic enjoyable start, building up to a terrifyingly bleak, crushing and plot-twisting finish. Upsetting, very upsetting and challenging if you're willing to think about the messages, the themes, and the repercussions of how society is today. As a parent I'm now terrified, as the main theme is how a picture postcard family goes completely off the rails. Aaarggggk!

Now ripping through Masters of Doom which is a funny read if you work in software development as I do, alongside creatives and geeks, or you - like me and my friends - grew up playing Doom. The book is about the two guys behind the development of the all-time classic video game Doom and their entrepreneurial American dream voyage from broken homes to multi-millionaire geek rock stars. Good book.